Elizabeth Roberts was on track to follow in her father’s footsteps and pursue a career in healthcare until her mother pushed her in a different direction. “After two years of general education, I told my mom that I was going to major in biology with the intention of doing pre-med, like everyone else in my family. She just said very quietly, ‘I really think that you should explore having a creative career,’” the New York architect tells host Dennis Scully on the latest episode of The Business of Home Podcast.

She ended up taking time off from school and worked at an architecture firm, immediately falling in love with the field. “It was the fact that there were colored pencils on the table, and there were skylights, and the way people worked, and the way they interacted, and what they talked about,” she says. “I think that it was partially this love for creating things, and partially just the love of being at work. And I really learned everything I know about architecture in my first two years. I hadn’t known anything about architecture other than living inside and around buildings, so I went to UC Berkeley and just dove into the deep end and learned a lot and loved it.”

In her college years, the Northern California native spent a few summers as a site architect on an archaeological dig in Crete, which inspired her to move to New York to pursue graduate studies in historic preservation at Columbia University. She went on to work for a few firms before going off on her own in 1998 and landing Sheryl Crow as one of her first clients—a project that ended up in the first issue of Dwellr. Since then, Roberts has become well known for her reinventions of Brooklyn townhouses (including Athena Calderone’s former Cobble Hill abode), and currently runs a team of 24 people.

Despite taking on a range of projects, her life’s mission is to reinterpret historical buildings. “I knew when I started this historic preservation program that I really loved the idea of finding new uses for old buildings. It just kind of checked a lot of boxes for me,” she says. “Aesthetically, I loved putting brand-new things next to crumbling old things. I loved the environmental [and sustainable aspect] of dealing with an existing shell and finding a way to make it beautiful again.”

Elsewhere in the episode, she discusses the benefits of working with an owner’s rep, why her firm takes on interior design as well as architecture, and how she organizes her 24-person team.

Crucial insight: Roberts started her firm from a desk in her East Village apartment bedroom, armed with a laptop and a fax machine. Looking back, she says she wouldn’t have it any other way, and that starting small gave her the freedom to take on the projects she really wanted. “I wanted to make it work [in] my own way for my own reasons and my own values. I wanted to be in control of the types of projects that I would be working on, and I just was determined,” she says. “I think working from home in that location and for a number of years after that allowed me to really develop a portfolio of projects that I loved because I didn’t have a huge amount of pressure with overhead, and I was able to just take on one or two projects a year and dive in deep, and I think that was a hugely important move for my career.”

Key quote: “The best projects at ERA are the projects where we do complete interiors and complete architecture. As opposed to some other classic models where the architect does a building and gets all the permits and even starts construction perhaps before the interior designer comes in, I think the best process is really for the interior designers to sit with the client and with the architecture team and for us all to hear the genesis, the beginnings of these projects all together. It allows for all these creative minds to create something new and different.”

This episode is sponsored by Loloi and Kohler. Listen to the show below. If you like what you hear, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

The Thursday Show

Host Dennis Scully and BOH executive editor Fred Nicolaus discuss the biggest news in the design world, including sweeping new tariffs, a designer’s arrest in California, and whether GLP-1s are transforming home design. Later, digital marketing consultant Ian Lurie joins the show to share advice on helping AI chatbots find your business.

This episode is sponsored by Joon Loloi. Listen to the show below. If you like what you hear, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.